Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Two Weeks In Another Town

Consider staying there.

I've never seen this movie before and it was on this morning. Actually, I still haven't seen it. It's Kirk Douglas month on TCM and I guess I'm not sophisticated enough for this kind of material. I was getting all schpilkes and switched to I Love Lucy.

It caused me to reflect on movies made in that era. Really bad, dreadful, boring, intense, pointless stories with lots of scenery chewing.

Apparently the Kirk Douglas character is mentally deranged...I mean, he's had some kind of emotional upset when the movie begins and he's been in a sanitarium (?). He's a very disagreeable, bad tempered person and he should have been talking to his rabbi instead of the doctor who obviously didn't help change his ability to deal with other people AT ALL. He goes to Rome because Edward G. Robinson gives him a 2 week gig dubbing his new movie which seems like a total hash--a spaghetti western without the cowboys--as most of those Cinecitta flicks were in that era. Kirk isn't grateful for this opportunity, he's still angry.

Do you need to see Bad and the Beautiful first? Because I'm lost.

So I don't know what kind of movie this is. I know there are a couple "beautiful" women and I assume...oh come on, they have essentially anonymous sex and that's the end of that. You can't convince me this guy is capable of any real relationship, he's too angry and aggrieved. It's not a romance/love story on any level. Yes, that's according to me--feel free to disagree.

There was a big thank you to the AMPAS for using the image of the Oscar. Should I mention that AMPAS wouldn't exist but for movies/Hollywood so who should be thanking who. What a load of hokum that award is anyway.

So Kirk's character 6 years ago was famous but now he's a has-been (no, I didn't go to Wikipedia and waste 5 minutes of my life reading up about this movie). Then Eddie holds up the Oscar (named after Bette Davis' uncle, so a story goes) and says "We made some great movies."

That would be in the mid 50's and the only good movie made in that timeframe I can think of is Forbidden Planet.
Such dreary movies.

Hollywood inflicted those on us for about 15 years. Then we got the spate of ridiculous movies made by people stoned out of their skulls. And now we have movies essentially made for people who have reached their majority in age only. So almost everything is a cartoon either with animation or with live "actors".